No End In Sight
by Sarge Tomzilla
Summary: A German soldier serving on the Eastern Front recollects the changes in a fifteen year war with no end.


**A/N: I got the idea playing the default World War II scenario, and is from a game I'm playing that I continued past the end. I'm still trying to work on my other fanfic, but wrote this since I couldn't think of anything else.**

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**No End In Sight**

Guenther rested against one side of his foxhole, lazily cleaning his Sturmgewehr-51 of grease and dirt. _Got to keep the damned things clean or they jam too easily_, floated through his mind. But if it jammed, he was screwed. Life in occupation duty taught that. It was easy to relax and put your guard down. And then you would be dead. Soviet guerilla's knew how to strike hard, fast, and then withdraw. Nearly fifteen years of on and off warfare had trained both sides, and slaughtered so many. _Fifteen years_… Guenther reached with one hand into his field-grey overcoat, splashed with white-wash, and pulled out a small notepad and looked over marked-off days. Sure enough, it was February, 1956. Come June, the Ostfront would be in its fifteenth year. So many things had changed. The war itself had changed.

Guenther was too young to remember the beginning of the war in the East, and not even born when the war in the West begun. He did remember his father speaking of friends that served in panzer divisions in Poland, when Operation: Alexei began. The Soviet offensive into Greater Germany. That day in June, when the Soviets broke the peace treaty signed two years prior. The heroism of technologically inferior Panzer II's and III's against Soviet T-34's and KV-2's, tanks now useless as Kaiser Tigers battled Iosef Stalin 3's, in the fierce battles that raged from Koenigsburg to Krakow. How the first truces began after Germany and it's allies counterattacked and forced the Soviets from the Baltic States, and pushed towards the Black Sea in the South. But the loss of even an inch of land had doomed the two nations to continue the struggle again, and again to the present.

Staring across the horizon, just vast, frozen fields for miles upon miles all around, Guenther silently wished he had gotten occupation duty for the British Isles, France, or the Middle East. _Anywhere_, except the cursed ground he was dug into. _Well, maybe not Britain._ His father had served there, in the five year battle to defeat Germany's forty-year foe. His father still refused to talk about the things he had seen in that meat grinder. When the battle started there, the Reich still used prop-engine aircraft, bolt-action rifles; things that were now obsolete and relics. By the time the last holdouts in Ireland and Scotland fell, the Reich had high-powered automatic rifles like his own StG-51, turbo-engine aircraft, and the most terrible weapon the world had ever known. The weapon which made the land he sat on cursed. Most of the outposts and barracks were now lead-lined to protect against radiation poisoning, so great was the use of the nuclear bomb in the East. Almost every Soviet city west of the Urals had suffered its effects. So many innocents dead. But his country had not started this war, he reminded himself. _We didn't start it…but we'll finish it_.

As if on cue, a new sun arose to the east of him. He made almost no reaction, except a quiet muttering of, "God have mercy…". A rumbling attracted his attention from the opposite direction, as an armored APC rolled up towards his foxhole. A hatch opened up in the back, and a _Feldwebel_ popped his head and gun out before shouting, "Come on you _dummkopf_, unless you want to die a painful death we're getting back to base, and safety. Now move!"

Guenther hopped out of his foxhole quick as he could, and sprinted to the APC yelling, "Us or them this time?"

"Who the hell do you think? They got sneaky and attacked towards Gorky and Moscow, we're going to make the fuckers pay. Now come on, _Kaiserstadt_ is safe for now, but we got to be prepared!"

As he reached the APC, Guenther realized that no matter how much the damn war had changed, it was still nowhere near finished. And it probably never would be.


End file.
